Sleep deprivation–induced amnesia is a kind of retrograde amnesia where exhaustion causes us to forget information—a phenomenon those who have pulled an all-nighter before an important exam are all too familiar with. But the memories themselves aren’t truly lost, and a drug that’s already approved for use in people can bring them back, a mouse study published December 27 in Current Biology demonstrates—a finding which the study’s authors say may apply to other forms of memory loss.
Sleep deprivation is a ubiquitous problem in society today. Robert Havekes, a neuroscientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, says that everybody knows things go wrong in the brain with sleep deprivation, but he wanted to investigate whether it’s possible to assist the brain in memory recall.
Prior research had suggested that the memories lost in other forms of retrograde amnesia do not vanish from the brain, but rather are suboptimally ...
